"Watershed Core" sculpture

Watershed Core

Public Sculpture + Education Platform | 2020–2021 | Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY

Watershed Core is a large-scale public sculpture and environmental learning project presented in collaboration with +More Art and Prospect Park Alliance. Installed at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn during the summer of 2021, the sculpture drew public attention to the rarely-seen labor, both human and non-human, that goes into sustaining New York City’s drinking water system.

Shaped as a 10-foot-tall geodesic sphere, Watershed Core functioned as a sculptural ecosystem: a living structure built from native plants, soil, stone, and reclaimed plastics that filtered water in a gravity-fed system. Designed to mirror the geologic filtration processes of NYC’s upstate watershed, the sculpture invited viewers to engage directly with water as a living commons—and as a system under threat.

Part of the larger Public Water project, Watershed Core emerged from a year-long campaign highlighting the histories, inequalities, and environmental politics of the New York City drinking watershed.

Project Details

• Years: 2020–2021
• Installation Dates: June 3 – September 7, 2021
• Location: Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY
• Commissioned by: More Art, with Brooklyn Public Library, Prospect Park Alliance, NYC Parks
• Components: Public sculpture, self-guided audio tour (Waterways and Woodlands), digital campaign (A Year of Public Water)
• Materials: Steel, reclaimed plastic, native plants, soil, stone, water, filtration substrates

“New York City’s drinking water travels over a hundred miles through a vast and complex watershed system. It’s easy to take that for granted. Watershed Core was an attempt to bring the hidden into visibility: to celebrate the people, places, and ecosystems that make clean water possible, and to imagine a more reciprocal relationship between city residents and the land that sustains them. We are life-partners but we may never meet. The sculpture is built like the watershed itself. It filters water using gravity, minerals, plants, and time. It’s also a gathering place, a quiet system, and a call to protect the commons. Public water belongs to all of us, and that means we have to care for it together.” - Mattingly

Installation Description

The sculpture took the form of a steel-framed dome, layered with filtration materials that echoed the structure of NYC’s Catskill and Delaware watersheds: geologic systems that provide over a billion gallons of clean water each day. Visitors could walk around the structure and witness water moving through its layers.

Accompanying the sculpture, the team created Waterways and Woodlands, a self-guided audio tour of Prospect Park exploring both natural and engineered systems of water remediation—including the park’s ecoWEIR system and the broader context of the NYC watershed. The guide was read by Jason Chan and Mary Mattingly.

Watershed Core began with a year-long educational campaign, A Year of Public Water, a digital project that released weekly content exploring the political, geological, and social history of New York’s drinking water system. It included research essays, interviews, maps, and a participatory narrative, "A Story About the NYC Drinking Watershed" which traced the city’s water story from deep geologic time to the present day.

Exhibition + Campaign Partners

• Lead Partner: More Art
• Collaborators: Prospect Park Alliance, Brooklyn Public Library, NYC Parks
• Audio Tour Platform: Gesso
• Digital Campaign: public-water.com
• Project Duration: June 2020 – September 2021

Photographic Documentation